I know of no artist more steadfastly
committed to an organized pattern of growth and development than
Patrick Burns. He began his career as a printmaker; there is something
about his emblematic use of insects and sub-aqueous creatures that
smacks of a medieval bestiary, the sort that Durer would have consulted
before engraving his Rhinoceros or the kind that Leonard Baskin
imitated in his expressionist woodcuts. Such comparisons are brought to
mind by the consummate draftsmanship Burns shares with Durer, a skill
always evident in the paintings I have seen during more than ten years
of visits to his studios in Baltimore and New York. In the past, his
animals and insects were forced to share the stage with a wide range of
expressionistic symbols, a pyramidal house of burning briars, a shower
of appliquéd potatoes, white splotches of paint in rounded forms and
drips; throughout, the use of layered images bore some relation to the
work of Francis Picabia, Robert Rauschenberg and David Salle, requiring
the viewer to decipher a coded message. This forced complexity
naturally distracted from the visual enchantment of the pictures,
especially the exquisite white splotches and drips that seemed to
combine the energy of abstract expressionism with Sigmar Polke’s
signature focus on the fortuitous errors that occur in the process of
printing images. But Pat’s strong graphic sense has led him on to
bigger and better things. A few years ago Burns began making small
drawings on sandpaper, some of which contained map-like silhouettes
recalling the land of his Irish forebears. The scale of these drawings
forced Burns to restrict the number of motifs and brought out the
essentially abstract nature of his artistic project. Black bars began
to appear trimming one end or another and the blackness was further
reinforced by his exuberant use of soft sticks of pure charcoal against
the rough surface of the sandpaper. These Blackout drawings represent a
critical development on the road to his present work. In Blackout-Stag
Beetle, two squares at the top seem to compress the head of the insect
until graphite pours itself out of the insect’s body into the empty
white space below; in Blackout Black Widow, the vertical bars, like a
jail-cell, almost completely occlude the image of the insect, leaving
only the legs behind to carry the energy of the artist’s scrawling
lines. Subtle pinks and yellows enter some of the later works on paper
and a checkerboard of rectangular bars begins to compete for space with
the expanse of black (see Blackout Tarantula), the notional creature
having been submerged in a Motherwell-like cloud.

In both paintings and drawings Burns evinces
a similar mastery of scale; a single insect or animal form, most
successfully a jellyfish or beetle, is partially occluded by the
pseudo-random placement of one or more rectangular black bars (e.g.
Wasp 7 & 8 and Sting-Red & Green). The final pattern is a
combination of design and chance, the predominantly vertical or
horizontal disposition of the bars outlined in pencil before one or
more cells are chosen to be filled in. The bars occlude but do not
obscure the emblematic images—the viewer readily completes their
outlines within his or her mind. By occluding but not obscuring the
forms, Burns heightens the sense of threat and preserves the mystery of
partially seen jaws and tentacles. The use of the velvety black bars
recalls the post and lintel paintings of Brice Marden. In the Blackout
drawings, the gravitational flow of charcoal falling from the bars has
been preserved with a spray of fixative and the tension between
expressionist chance (a la Motherwell) and post-minimalist plan is
further enhanced. Despite the use of a dominant image, there is no
sense of recession or depth in these pictures; they are as flat as
decals or tattoos. In some of the best paintings (e.g. Wasp 7 & 8)
the very idea of coherent space is completely fractured by wings that
are partially black and partially red and by bars or squares that are
indeterminately in front of or behind half-depicted anatomy. Wasp also
gives us a partial view of a deeper layer, the windows of black opening
up on a blue and yellow “sky” in pastel tonalities. As the work
progresses, the drawn images re-unite into emblems and decals but the
decisively brightened and fractured colors continue to frustrate our
ability to see the jellyfish in Sting-Red & Green or the scorpion
in Sting-Yellow & Purple; in order to see the clarification
produced by the new palette, a more coherent emblem and a reduction in
the number of color cells, compare Sting-Blue & Orange to Wasp 7
& 8. These latest paintings with their bold colors and coherent
emblems veer closer to a Pop or Warholian sensibility and leave their
expressionist tendencies behind. Stare at the left half of Sting-Red
& Green and one of Warhol’s Oxidation (“piss”) paintings begins to
appear. The replication of abstract color bars in the Sting series
takes the place of the repeated portraits of celebrity heads in
Warhol’s most iconic and most minimalist, because most cellular, work.
These new paintings by Burns have much to say about the post-modern
confrontation of oppositional styles (i.e. abstraction vs.
representation) and the recuperation or appropriation of prior modes of
image and mark making. This is explicitly recognized in the Conflict
series, especially the fifth and best battle of Primaries and
Secondaries enacted by a pair of insects against a field of orange; in
this wonderful painting, the legs of the insects, strangely hoof-like,
scatter like Pollock’s skeins of paint, moving in and out of minimalist
bars symmetrically arranged like French flags at Borodino. Burns is
thoughtfully fighting his way into the future without ever denying his
origins as a printmaker or his gifts as a draftsman. That he is now a
colorist of the first order has only further vivified his art. The
combination of obvious visual pleasure with subtle disquietude fixes
the images in the viewer’s mind, dread and delight in equal measure.

MICHAEL SALCMAN, poet,
physician and art critic, was chairman of neurosurgery at the
University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in
Baltimore. Currently Special Lecturer in the Osher Institute at Towson
University, he has taught history of contemporary art and lectured on
the brain and creativity at Towson University, Johns Hopkins, the
Walters Art Museum, the Maryland Institute College of Art and the
Cooper Union in New York. His course on How The Brain Works is
available through The Knowledge Network of the New York Times. Recent poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Notre Dame Review, Ontario Review, Raritan, and New York Quarterly. He is the author of four chapbooks and two collections, The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, Washington, DC), nominated for The Poet’s Prize and a Finalist for The Towson University Prize in Literature, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011). His poems have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Euphoria,
Lee Boot’s award-winning documentary on the brain and creativity
(2008). His work has received five nominations for a Puschcart Prize.
Salcman is currently completing his anthology of classic and
contemporary poems on doctors and diseases. www.salcman.com